Friday, 28 August 2015

The death toll of migrants at the
borders of Europe just keeps on rising. More than three hundred thousand have
tried to cross the Mediterranean Sea this year, already 40 per cent up on 2014.
The International Office of Migration has confirmed 2,432 deaths ‘associated
with the sea crossings’ in 2015. Many more people have disappeared. ‘Associated’
deaths and disappearances mean DROWNINGS, of which more anon.

When we do get serious information about
conditions in Syria or Eritrea it becomes obvious why so many are leaving.
Faced with barrel bombing, starvation and homelessness, let alone arrest or compulsory
conscription, I would be the first to
risk death in exchange for some hope of a decent life for myself and my
children.

Papyrus of Timotheus' 'drowning barbarian' poem

As I write, the TV screen witnesses to
the despair of people rescued from the boats which capsized yesterday off the Libyan
coast. Scores of orange body bags fluoresce on the Zuwara docks. The estimated
fatalities from Thursday already amount to two hundred. I just can’t understand
how the drownings can keep on coming while the world looks on. We may try to wash our hands clean of the
toxic fallout from 500 years of colonialism plus 25 of ill-considered ‘western
intervention’ in sovereign states. But posterity will despise us to a man and
woman for our pathetic inaction now.

Nor are we hearing enough about the
horror of death by drowning. Each one of those body bags contains a story of a terrifying and excruciating individual death. Drowning survivors report extreme pain in the
upper chest, spreading down the lungs and arms, compounded by cramps in the
legs, choking, and searing pressure on ear drums and eye balls. This agony can
last for up to eight minutes before consciousness is lost.

Drowning is so vile that it has been
used as a form of punitive capital punishment and in Guantanamo as a method of
torture. The earliest extended description of a drowning comes in a
triumphalist ancient Greek
poem by Timotheus celebrating the death of a member of Xerxes’ forces who couldn’t
swim and suffered terribly before expiring at the battle of Salamis. I.e. drowning
is a death you do wish on your worst
enemy.

Unimaginable suffering

In an obscenely first-world way, in
Greece on Tuesday I experienced the terror that comes before being overwhelmed by
the Mediterranean. As a privileged touristic swimmer, I stupidly assumed that I could front-crawl my way through some huge waves in a high wind against prudent expert advice. I did win my battle with the sea,
just, but have a badly strained shoulder muscle as a reward for my hubristic recklessness.
Feeling chastened in every sense.

Saturday, 22 August 2015

Feeling
glum about the prospects for democracy in either Greece/the EU or the UK
Labour Party, I sought solace in visiting the location of an exciting scene from the defence
of democracy in ancient Kerkyra (Corfu).

The
plan was to find some tiles on the island in order to help me reimagine, if not
reconstruct by nifty photo-montaging, my favourite sentence in the ancient historian
Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian
War.

"ANYONE FANCY A TILE FIGHT with the OLIGARCHS?"

During
the civil war in 427 BCE, there was a street battle in Corfu’s main town
between the groups supporting the oligarchs and the democrats respectively.
Thucydides, whose usual policy is to ignore women, describes how not only
slaves but women on the democratic
side joined in the actual fighting: ‘the woman also entered the fray with great
daring, hurling down tiles from the roof-tops and standing up to the din with a
courage that went beyond what was natural to their sex’ (3.74).

CORFU ARCHAELOGICAL MUSEUM: VICTIM OF AUSTERITY

Having
identified as venue an antique central street with plenty of promising tiled roofs,
we went to the island’s famous Archaeological Museum hoping to photo a tile or
two from the fifth-century BCE. Guess what? The Museum is now closed
indefinitely. A huge padlock and chain locks its gates. The sign lies in the
dust, already rusting.

The staff, as public servants, cannot be paid thanks to
the Eurocrats who worship Kapital and despise Greek democratic processes. So
the very cultural resources underpinning the tourist industry, crucial to any
prospect of Greek economic recovery, are being made unavailable through
Austerity.

ARTEMIS OF CORFU

I tried to console myself with online images of the indomitable animal-taming Artemis,
from the magnificent western pediment of the archaic local temple, which
tourists like me can no longer see at the museum. I like to think it was she-god images
like this which inspired the democratic women of 5th-century Corfu to put two
fingers up—and throw tiles down—at the rich elite forces opposing them. Eurocrats beware: offending Artemis is always
risky. Just ask the Atridae.

Tuesday, 11 August 2015

Success
greeted my quest for the missing memorial to a Greek scholar who in
1762 published a fine translation of Xenophon’s Memorabilia and Apology of
Socrates. Long hidden from intellectual history, Sarah Fielding really is right there, inside the North-West vestibule of Bath Abbey.

Part
of the inscription reads ‘Athens’ Wisdom to her Sex she taught’;
but it wasn’t only to her sex. Plenty of men used her translations; her Apology, chosen for the Everyman series,
was reprinted until 1937.

Her
Etonian brother Henry, playwright and novelist, was envious of her largely
self-taught classical skills. His fame has overshadowed her completely. People
also suspect that the classically educated but immoral and dissipated Molly in
his novel Amelia is a covert attack on his
clever sister.

Before: Sarah Invisible

People
inevitably alleged that even Sarah's bestelling novel David Simple was really Henry’s work. Elizabeth Carter, the
translator of Epictetus, had no reason to talk up her reclusive friend, which might have taken the lustre off Elizabeth's own reputation as the best woman Hellenist
around.

Sarah
had loved Henry dearly, and when his wife died she moved in with him in Lincoln’s
Inn Fields to help with the house and children. He responded by impregnating
the scullery maid. Sarah moved out. Most men called her ‘poor Sarah’ because she never
married; women called her ‘poor Sarah’ because she was an eccentric, couldn’t
cook, and allegedly tippled.

After: Sarah Rediviva! photo: R. Poynder

She
also wrote the first book specifically for girls, The Governess, or the Little Female Academy (1749),* and biographies
of Cleopatra and Octavia. But when she died, she disappeared. There is no known
likeness. This made finding the memorial stone important, partly because Dr Rosie Wyles and I need a picture to put in our forthcoming Unsealing the Fountain: Women Classical Scholars (OUP).

Athena with pet

Several
antique guide books claimed it was in Bath Abbey, but nobody there knew what I
was talking about. Other literary historians have been unable to find it. The
reason is that it is low down, concealed by a heavy lectern, probably for decades.
Our sharp-eyed teenager spotted just the
name SARAH peeking over its top; after moving it (fortunately the Abbey
attendant nearby was not officious), teenager’s father photographed her. The
snake encircling Sarah was the pet of Athena, goddess of wisdom, and (because
it sheds its skins) an ancient symbol of immortality.

After that

Mission
accomplished, we went to the pub and raised a toast to the scholar celebrated
by her close friend Dr John Hoadly, who commissioned the memorial, for her ‘unaffected
manners’, her candour and benevolence. An exciting afternoon’s work.

Text of the Memorial Stone

In this city lived and died Sarah, second daughter of General Henry Fielding; by his first wife, daughter of Judge Gould. Whose writings will be known as incentives to virtue, and honour to her sex, when this marble shall be dust. She was born mdccxiv. and died April mdcclxvih.

Her unaffected kindness, candid mind,

Her heart benevolent, and soul resign'd,

Were more her praise than all she knew, or thought.

Though Athens' wisdom to her sex she taught.

The Rev. Dr. John Hoadley, her Friend, for the honour of the Dead and emulation of the Living, inscribes this deficient Memorial of her virtues and accomplishments.

Saturday, 8 August 2015

I
woke from a dream on Wednesday night with a song about Jeremy Corbyn, to the
tune of the Beatles’ Eleanor Rigby,
ringing in my ears. Since it has clearly been inspired by the Muses, I have posted it below after emendations suggested by
Professor Ian Rutherford, an expert on ancient Greek lyric metre.

I
believe the poem was produced by my subconscious coping with the stress related to joining the UK Labour Party for the third time, having left
both when its leaders did not support the miners and when they did support the
invasion of Iraq.

The
stress is caused by being personally mis-described EVERY DAY in the press,
which is frantically trying to identify who all the new members of the Labour
Party are. So, for the record, I am not and never have been any of the
following except, long ago, no. 2:

A Member of Militant Tendency Practising
Entryism.

A Young Person who Can’t Afford to Get
on the Property Ladder.

A Revolutionary Trotskyite (perish
the thought; I'm a Bolshevik).

An Antediluvian Naïve Idealist.

A Sinister Right-Wing Fifth Columnist.

You can find the music to sing the
poem (the first I've ever published) along to here. I wish, as Dr Lucy
Jackson, an expert on Greek choruses, has said to me, that my subconscious had
chosen a more upbeat Beatles song (Drive
my Car, She Loves You etc.), but
the picture of Corbyn on the night bus, in full melancholia, clearly affected
my Muse.